Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [95]
Dick ended up as a trainee salesman at Doubleday, having chosen the business of book publishing as casually and accidentally as I had. Perhaps for that reason, we got along well from the very first. Almost everybody in the book business says that he always wanted to be involved with books, and perhaps it’s true, but Dick and I were alike in never having given the matter any thought at all. Disappointment is a well-known spur to ambition, and it seemed to have worked in both our cases.
It is a curious fact that one makes the really significant friendships of one’s life in much the same way as one falls in love, with one sudden, fell swoop—un coup de foudre, as the French say—and almost never by small degrees. It takes a lot of time and shared experience to make a friendship permanent, to harden it, but in my life the friendships that matter have been made instantly, and nothing afterward has ever changed or diminished them. Somehow, there formed between Dick and me in that claustrophobic little car a friendship that was to last through the decades, despite the fact that we had very little in common. In some ways, in fact, we appeared to be opposites. Dick was a born businessman, with a head for numbers and a real thirst for confrontation, whereas I was a born editor, happiest alone with a book or a manuscript, and in business matters, as in everything else, a natural compromiser. I do not think either of us realized how valuable these different qualities might be if they were wielded together, for a purpose. But that, of course, was in the future.
As we entered Atlantic City, the view became more and more depressing. Beyond the deserted boardwalk a gray sea met an equally gray, damp sky. Most of the old hotels were closed, their windows boarded up with plywood, their facades moistly crumbling with decay. The hotel we were booked into did not look any better, though it did have glass in the windows instead of plywood. A wizened old man dressed in a threadbare bellboy’s outfit took us up to our suite in a trembling, clanking old elevator, which looked to have been the first one Otis ever made. “You guys come here for the convention?” he asked. I signified that we had. He sighed deeply. “Tell you one thing,” he went on, in a lugubrious voice. “The librarians don’t tip worth a damn.”
The suite itself had ancient maroon curtains laced with dust and cobwebs, the beds were creaking and lumpy, the bathroom a nightmare of cracked, yellowing tiles and wheezing pipes. Having dragged our luggage into the suite with great difficulty, the bellboy stood forlornly at the door, a pillbox hat perched ridiculously at a slant on his bald head, the sleeves of his tattered bum-freezer jacket shiny where he had rubbed his nose on them, his gnarled hand extended for a tip. Dick palmed several bills into his hand and sent him off for a bottle of scotch and some ice. The only thing that cheered Dick up was the fact that there would be several hundred women downstairs at cocktail time, with practically no men. “We’ll wash up,” he said, “have a drink, then check out the talent.”
But when we went downstairs to the hotel ballroom, the talent was disappointing. It was basically a room full of middle-aged women, intent on talking about books, especially literary novels and poetry, and even Dick’s enthusiasm for the opposite sex soon melted. The lights dimmed, and we all trooped into the banquet room, where Dick and I found ourselves at a table with six pleasant but rather elderly librarians from Cleveland. Since my wife had often sung the praises of Cleveland’s library system, I, at least, had something to talk about—perhaps the only time in my life when a familiarity with the cultural